Campaigning for a ban on foie gras is like demanding comfier chairs for torture victims

Do you like foie gras? I don't really get the excitement, myself. It tastes exactly the same as ordinary pâté such as you'd buy in Tesco, but fattier. Anyway, some people think it's great and worth spending lots of money on. As with oysters and caviar, that largely makes me think of Douglas Adams's description of Antarean parakeet glands: "a revolting but much-sought-after cocktail delicacy and very large sums of money are often paid for them by very rich idiots who want to impress other very rich idiots".

You'll know why, of course: because it's cruel. The geese and ducks whose livers are later eaten are force-fed via a pipe several times a day for weeks, until their liver grows fattier, like that of an alcoholic human, and expands up to 1000 per cent. This process is known as "gavage", and is banned in Britain, although we can still import the livers of geese that have been tortured elsewhere if we like, sort of like we used to outsource our "enhanced interrogations" to Syria or wherever in the glory days of the War on Terror.

And it is cruel, of course it is. Let's not pretend otherwise.

But what I don't understand, if you'll forgive a bit of what-aboutery, is why foie gras is the poster child for animal cruelty. About 21,300 tonnes (23,500 tons) of foie gras are made a year worldwide, and each fattened duck liver weighs between 600g and a kilogram (1.3 to 2.2lb), so we can work that out as between about 20 million and 36 million birds annually. That, obviously, is quite a lot of birds. Isn't it?

Well, no, not really. For comparison, it's about 0.08 per cent of the number of chickens that are bred for food every year worldwide (50 billion, or thereabouts). But luckily, that's not a problem, because all those chickens live a life of rural luxury on their Warwickshire farms before being humanely dispatched by a weeping farmer.

You'll have noticed a hint of irony in that last sentence. As surely all of us know, a vast number of these luckless birds are grown in tiny cages barely large enough for them to turn around; they are bred from egg to slaughter in as little as five weeks, and suffer from deformities of the legs and pelvis from the unnaturally large breast muscles they have been bred for, as well as burns from the ammonia of their droppings which gathers around their feet. Many have their beaks trimmed to prevent them from attacking other birds, which they are likely to do in the crowded and stressful conditions; this is believed to cause both acute and chronic pain. In the UK alone, as many as 19 million chickens bred for meat die of heart failure every year due to the added weight and overcrowding. Nineteen million: that's getting up to the lower estimate of the number of geese and ducks bred for foie gras worldwide, just in the UK, not counting the chickens bred for laying, and that's only the ones who die of heart failure. The global number of birds who suffer horribly all their short, crappy lives must be in the tens of billions.

It's too easy, and probably wrong, to say that the difference between the chickens and the foie gras is that foie gras is perceived as a posh person's food. But a number of people who decry the force-feeding of geese probably eat fried chicken from greasy takeaways on a Friday night, and I seriously doubt their food lived any happier a life than the cordon bleu equivalent they rail against: it opens them up to charges of hypocrisy.

This strange focus on tiny side issues is not new. See also animal medical testing, which may have methodological flaws but can save lives, and fox hunting, which may be a bit unpleasant in the enjoyment people get out of it but is, surely, a gigantic irrelevance in terms of the quantities of suffering that goes on at the hands of either man or nature.

As I say, you could accuse me of what-aboutery. I'm sure that animal rights activists do rail against bad farming conditions, and so they should. And to hell with the gourmands who believe in "the freedom to eat what you like" (up to and including panda or human, I assume?): maybe the world would be a slightly better place if we manage to ban the practice of gavage altogether, although I doubt the foie gras-eaters will immediately become vegetarians. But there is a wilful blindness to it, an urgent staring at the wrong problem.

It also highlights the larger issue: we won't be able to stop animal suffering, and I doubt we'll be able to do all that much to alleviate it. We certainly won't be able to stop it in nature, where most animals live short, frightened, disease-filled lives and die at the hands, or more accurately teeth and talons and constricting coils, of predators. And while we can improve farming methods, we probably won't be able to significantly reduce it in food production, because there are simply too many people to feed who can't afford to buy free-range – unless we go down the Margaret Atwood route of growing chicken breasts and lamb shanks in vitro (which we should). All this, of course, is before we get on to the suffering of real human beings. One day I'll write a post about the tragicomedy of Britons giving more money to donkey sanctuaries than domestic abuse charities.

The battles over fox-hunting and foie gras are expending a lot of energy to move a few drops of pain around in the ocean of suffering that surrounds us, and which will almost certainly almost surround us. I hope it makes the activists feel better, because it's doing 99.92 per cent of sod-all for the birds.